As an Italian-American and a former staff member for Mario Cuomo, I have been wrestling with how best to express my outrage over the fact that if Donald Trump’s name contained six vowels—like say, Mario Cuomo’s—his Presidential candidacy would be swimming with the fishes because Trump has been in bed with mobsters for his entire professional life.

The list of the Trump family’s—both Fred Trump, who left his son $200 million dollars and a legacy of lying about his wealth and businesses, and Donald’s—ties to organized crime, or “Mob-Nobbing” as Wayne Barrett aptly named it in his book Trump: The Deals & the Downfall, reads like a Who’s Who of Mafioso in the New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia Metropolitan Areas over the past five decades. Just a few of the law-breaking luminaries or their mob-fronted companies, which can be found in Barrett’s book, who either did business with the Trumps, served as their partners (secret or otherwise), or made labor or building problems go away in exchange for cash, included:

• Manny Ciminello; construction contractor, racketeer, tied to S & A Concrete;
• Paul Castellano; head of Gambino Mob; secret owner of S & A Concrete;
• Fat Tony Salerno; head of Genovese Mob; secret owner of S & A Concrete;
• S & A Concrete; Mob-front concrete company, run by Nick Auletta; built Trump Tower and Trump Plaza;
• Willie Tomasello; Fred Trump’s partner on Beach Haven; Genovese associate;
• Nicky Scarfo; Atlantic City/Philadelphia Crime Boss; Cleveland Wrecking Co;
• Cleveland Wrecking Company; mob-front demolition co., hired by Trump;
• Wachtel Plumbing; mob-front co.; hired by Trump in Atlantic City & NYC;
• Teddy Maritas; mobbed-up head of Carpenters Union; NYC Trump contract;
• Circle Industries; Maritas’ mobbed up Drywall Co; Trump hired, NYC;
• John Cody; mobbed-up head of Teamsters Local 282; jailed for racketeering; bragged that “Donald liked to deal with me through Roy Cohn.”
• Nick Auletta: President of S & A Concrete, mob-controlled cement company;
• Joe DePaolo; President of Dic Underhill Co; company with alleged mob connections; helped build Trump Village with Fred Trump;
• Danny Sullivan; partner in SSG, Inc; deal-making arm of Scarfo Mob, negotiated with Trump on land in Atlantic City;
• Kenny Shapiro; scrap-metal dealer, partner SSG; principle financier for Scarfo’s Philadelphia Crime Organization.

Writing in Politico just last week (May 22, 2016) David Cay Johnston, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter whose book Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business carefully details Trump’s ties with organized crime, stated:

“No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.”

The torrent of thugs, terrible people and mob-front businesses Trump and his father were involved with going back more than 50 years permeates every present-day action Donald Trump takes.  If Mario Cuomo was in the same room for five minutes with just one of the mobsters that Donald Trump or his father did business with daily, his political career would have been finished. Instead, Trump shrugs it all off; an amoral actor playing among amoral peers. And the press, which apparently only looks for mob connections among Italian-American politicians, allows him to do it.

Imagine, for a moment, if Cuomo—anytime between 1985-1991, when the presidential boomlets for him reached their peaks—had gone to a private meeting in a posh New York townhouse with the boss of one of New York’s biggest crime families under investigation by the FBI.   Wayne Barrett’s book—backed by an eyewitnesses’ account–documents such a meeting between Trump and Genovese Crime Boss “Fat Tony” Salerno, who controlled the cement industry in New York, and attorney Roy Cohn—later disbarred–who represented many gangsters, and Trump. Would the media be silent about such a meeting if it occurred between the head of a Mafia crime family and an Italian-American candidate for President?

Even a Mob/Trump meeting broker as unsavory as Roy Cohn, whose long list of Organized Crime clients were clearly of financial value to Trump, would have been cited as proof that there were Mafia “skeletons” in Cuomo’s closet. The vowel at the end of his name would have been Cuomo’s indictment, plain and simple.   Yet, Trump and his shills get away with the absurd and inaccurate defense that “everybody was doing business that way,” when other major NYC real estate developers such as Sam LeFrak and the Resnick family clearly refused to, and were, instead, pleading with the FBI, and filing civil actions, to free them of mob control of the concrete business. Trump, no friend of law enforcement authorities, just kept quiet and paid his tithe. Such silence would have sentenced Mario Cuomo to political death by insinuation.

Far more dangerous than the double-standard at work here, evidenced by the way the media has failed to pursue Trump’s history of “Mob-Nobbing,” is the practical matter of putting Donald Trump in charge of Federal law enforcement agencies. Does any American who believes in the rule of law and justice really want someone so cozy with Mobsters to have power over the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, the NSA and Homeland Security? Does anyone seriously believe a President Trump would not try to bend those agencies to his will, steering investigations away from his friends and associates, quietly killing administrative inquiries or condemning federal judges conducting criminal fraud cases as “biased?”

Stick a vowel at the end of Trump’s name, and see if his family’s decades-long “incestuous intertwining with organized crime,” as Barrett described the many Trump/Mafia marriages of convenience, would still be ignored.

(Artwork by Keith Haring)

I’ve been spending too much time retailing this advice to family, friends and colleagues, so as a public service–as well as a favor to myself–I’m summarizing it here:

1. Stop Mourning about Trump–ORGANIZE!

2. Get off social media and go out and register 5 new voters (preferably people of color) each week for the next 20 weeks;

3. STOP fixating on Bernie Sanders; until Hillary seals the deal, only one thing is certain: Trump and his brand of racism, fascism, fraud and pathological lying is the enemy. Aim all your energy, time, talent and social media space at exposing his lies,  his history of hate mongering and his record of fraud committed upon working people. (e.g.. Trump University, his years of hiking prices to cover the cost of the construction industry’s “mob-tax” he willingly paid, and the Trump Organization’s long history of discrimination against people of color in its housing.)  Add to that his lack of substance on virtually every single public policy issue of our time and you’ve got Sweet Tweets for a lifetime.

 4. Stop Raging Against the Trump Media Machine: Just Feed It to Itself— Urge you State’s Attorney General, the United States AG, the IRS, and local DA’s with appropriate jurisdiction to launch investigations into Trump’s taxes, businesses, and past dealings with the Mob. Use his tabloid life against him. When he met with Genovese Crime Family Boss “Fat Tony” Salerno in Roy Cohn’s apartment did they just shoot the breeze? Did they discuss fixing cement prices? Does his announcement of “The Best Sex He Ever Had With Marla Maples,” still apply? Should we insist on seeing the birth certificates of any illegitimate children he may have fathered with other women?  Feed Social Media every single fact, quote, interview, tabloid headline and rumor that has appeared or been whispered about Trump over the past 40 years.  It’s what he does about others. It’s time to feed him to the media at his own game.

5. Finally, for my NYC brethren, pressure any of your five Borough District Attorneys to convene a Grand Jury and indict this Ham Sandwich for fraud, especially regarding Trump University. The thought of Trump under Oath–a perjurer’s perjurer–gives me goosebumps. Not even his buddy Roy Cohn could save Trump from himself, when his lies have legal consequences, instead of just as tools he uses to boost his ratings and earnings.

In short, now that the media reaped ratings riches by building Trump up (this one’s for you, Les Moonves, Mark Burnett & RogerAiles),it’s time to show  the media money machine that demolishing Trump’s Tower of Egomania & Narcissism will yield gobs and gobs of Gold, while serving the Public Good.

Roy Cohn, Manafort
Stone. Cannibals all, who’ll
Eat your bones. Ripping
Flesh from humanity’s rump;
Each one, hired by Trump–.
Mobsters, Marcos, Nixon too.
Drinking blood from me, and you.

A spokesman for the campaign has said the short-list will include ‘a woman.’ Hmmmm.

Well, Looks like SOMEONE at the Clinton Campaign is listening to me.  Last month, I published this blog about the air-tight case for a Clinton/Warren ticket, on my website at www.socialvisionproductions.com and on medium.com.  Here’s the Medium link:   https://medium.com/@stevevillano/clinton-warren-the-revolution-has-arrived-66f970ee7c40#.fwuv4ed6k

Source: Clinton Campaign Hints at Potential Woman Running Mate, Fueling Clinton/Warren Speculation @alternet

Thirty years ago this week, my son Matt Villano came with me to work on a Saturday when I accompanied my then-boss, Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo to give a speech before a scouting group. Cuomo, who was an inspiration to me, my son and many others, would often punctuate his speeches with references to the Paul Simon line of the need for heroes, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” With the degradation of politics and the repulsive pre-pubescent, anti-immigrant political campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, it’s time for a paraphrase: “Where have you gone, Mario Cuomo; our nation turns it’s lonely eyes to you…”

(Michael Specter, who has written about HIV/AIDS for more than 30 years, wrote yet another eloquent piece in The New Yorker on-line, on March 11, 2016, following Hillary Clinton’s praise–and then apology–for praising Nancy Reagan for “bringing HIV/AIDS to the world’s attention”, when in fact the Reagans did exactly the opposite.  I have re-printed Specter’s powerful piece on my blog “Radical Correspondence” because he I cannot express my thoughts better than he has on this matter.)

It will take somebody with more psychiatric sophistication than me to figure out how Hillary Clinton could have come to praise Ronald and Nancy Reagan, as she initially did earlier today, for having started the American conversation about AIDS “when, before, nobody talked about it.”

President Reagan’s first speech on the subject wasn’t until May 31, 1987. By then, more than twenty-five thousand people, the majority of them gay men, had died in the United States. His Administration ridiculed people with AIDS—his spokesman, Larry Speakes, made jokes about them at press conferences—and while I do think it rude to speak ill of the dead, particularly on the day of a funeral, this issue cannot be ignored. Mrs. Reagan refused to act in any way in 1985 to help her friend Rock Hudson when he was in Paris dying of AIDS. (Last year, Buzzfeed published documents that make this clear.)
Clinton’s comments caused an outcry and she apologized rapidly, writing, in a statement issued on Twitter, “While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, I misspoke about their record on H.I.V. and AIDS. For that, I’m sorry.” She deserves recognition for that. But her correction, while not nearly as offensive as her earlier comments, was also misguided.

In the nineteen-eighties, I covered the AIDS epidemic and the stem-cell wars for the Washington Post. I do not recall any occasion on which Ronald Reagan said or did anything that could be considered as “strong” advocacy for stem-cell research. One son, Ron, Jr., was in favor of the research and said so at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, the year his father died. That same year, Michael, Reagan’s other son, made a statement about that issue to anti-abortion-rights publications, that nobody ever contradicted: “The media continues to report that the Reagan ‘family’ is in favor of [embryonic] stem cell research, when the truth is that two members of the family have been long time foes of this process of manufacturing human beings—my dad, Ronald Reagan during his lifetime, and I.”

The idea that Ronald Reagan finally did focus on AIDS, if only belatedly, is also a fiction. Reagan was outraged in 1986, when his Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, one of the great heroes of the AIDS epidemic, issued a report that, as I wrote when Koop died, recommended a program of compulsory sex education in schools and argued that, by the time they reached third grade, children should be taught how to use condoms.

In 1990, when Ryan White died of AIDS, Reagan wrote a letter than ended with the words, “Ryan, my dear young friend, we will see you again.” But that letter really just shows the limits of Reagan’s sympathy. Ryan White was an absolutely delightful Indiana schoolboy who, in the early nineteen-eighties, received a transfusion of H.I.V.-infected blood. So he was an “innocent” AIDS victim, unlike the gay men Reagan did not like to mention. It is no coincidence that Reagan would feel comfortable singling White out to honor, nor is it by chance that the single biggest piece of H.I.V. legislation ever enacted in the United States is called the Ryan White Act. If the boy had happened to be a gay teen-ager, does anyone think Ronald Reagan would have written that letter? (I want to stress that this is not meant in any way to diminish the courage of Ryan White, whom I knew and wrote about more than thirty years ago. He was a wonderful person. It wasn’t his fault that he happened to be a straight white teen-ager from the Midwest, rather than a gay man from San Francisco.)

In the end, as Clinton wrote, Nancy Reagan was indeed “strong” on stem-cell research and on Alzheimer’s disease. Her conversion came when her husband plunged into the darkness of the disease. She was desperate, and would have done anything for him. It was a deeply admirable stance, and rare in her conservative world. Millions of other people, however, would surely have benefitted from that kind of support—had she offered it when her husband was capable of doing something to help alleviate so much suffering.

(About Michael Specter:
Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, and has written frequently about AIDS, T.B., and malaria in the developing world, as well as about agricultural biotechnology, avian influenza, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, and synthetic biology.)